


Never Worse, Never Better

by hashtag_anthems



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alice In Wonderland AU, M/M, also im tagging the ship bc it's endgame but this is slow burn hell guys, based on art by dejavidetc on tumblr, bc if there are two things i love, its lotor and alice in wonderland
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 03:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16803091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hashtag_anthems/pseuds/hashtag_anthems
Summary: Lotor knew his silly childhood fantasies to be nothing more than that: fantasies. His overactive imagination had distanced him from most of his family over the years, save for the more eccentric ones who at least tolerated him. This "Wonderland" was nothing but a collection of memories from some childhood game.He must surely be mad if the figments of his imagination are showing up to tell him that he's the only one who can save them now.





	Never Worse, Never Better

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by this art: https://dejavidetc.tumblr.com/post/180622697796/meanwhile-in-the-quintessence-field  
> Please go give them some love.

_This heat is unbearable…_

Lotor was practically falling asleep, lulled to such a state by the constant droning conversation flying entirely over his head and the incessant summer heat. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to stop the sun from beating relentlessly on everyone gathered there. It wasn’t that he didn’t _want_ to be here for his sister’s wedding. It was just that…

Nobody in the family really wanted to sit with him. Most just knew him as the scrappy kid that Alfor picked up off the streets out of some misguided sense of pity. He’d gotten stuck sitting with the aunts and uncles that Allura had only invited out of social necessity. To not invite them would have been inexcusable, but…

Like him, nobody else in the family really wanted to be around them either.

He was saved from falling directly into the plate of half-finished food that he’d been picking at for hours now by a blur of teal and white zipping past him. He sat back to avoid being hit by it, now wide awake, but everyone else at the table seemed to have either not noticed it, or not felt it worth even reacting to. They were still talking about… ships and… whatever business ventures they were pursuing…

Was he hallucinating? He scanned the garden where they were holding the reception, unable to find so much as a trace of… whatever that had been. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it. Allura was still at the other end of the garden, in her gorgeous white gown, laughing with her new husband. None of his socialite cousins were throwing a fit over some creature disturbing the reception. Maybe…

He must have imagined it, and yet…

“Is this the reality where there’s a 94% chance that I’m late, or a 96% chance?”

Lotor looked around for the source of the voice. He caught a glimpse of… _something_ slipping behind a shrub, and he only considered for a moment whether to follow it.

Not that anyone was paying attention to him, but he didn’t want to cause a scene at Allura’s wedding. Chasing after figments of his imagination, his cursed imagination that most of his family berated him for on every occasion they could find, would be exactly the type of scandal that would get him kicked out of the family for good.

“Oh, but maybe – no, I would have a _blue_ pocket watch if this was the reality where there’s only a 72% chance that I’m late!”

Lotor followed the voice through the maze-like shrubbery. Was there a maze? He hadn’t remembered seeing one mentioned anywhere. Nobody had brought it up. He didn’t remember it being _quite_ this hard to navigate on his way into the garden.

“Oh no, meeting you means that this is the reality where I’m 99% sure to be late!”

As Lotor picked himself up off the ground, rubbing his head where it had collided with the earth, something pushed him back down before using him like a springboard. He rolled to his feet and lunged at the creature. If he could grab onto it, then it couldn’t be a hallucination… right?

Oh, he needed to be committed for this.

“Can’t afford to stay and chat!” It was like… a ferret, but with too many feet. And it could talk. And it had… a beak? And an accent. And it was wearing a suit? “This is almost certainly the reality where I’m late!” It slipped out of his grasp and scurried away, faster than Lotor would have guessed a creature of its kind to be. On those short little legs, it sure could move…

He chased after it, despite the burning in his legs and the tightness in his chest. Damn these abominable dress clothes. Why couldn’t he find a hallucination to chase after when he wasn’t expected to dress like high society? He was just able to keep the creature in his sight, but barely. He would catch its tail whipping around a corner, or a corner of its jacket fluttering in the wind.

He cornered it in a clearing, surrounded by hedges too tall to climb over and too thick to climb through. There was a gnarled, leafless tree, as old as England by the way it towered over the garden. Lotor should have been able to see this from… from anywhere! He hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of any ancient trees all day. And why wasn’t it covered in leaves? It was summer. Every tree all over the country was covered in leaves at this time of year.

He had the creature trapped, though. Its only option was to double back and try to get past him.

Except…

Where was it?

Lotor took a step into the clearing, sure he could still hear that thing talking, fretting about his schedule and… the probability that he was going to miss something. What an odd creature…

The voice seemed to be coming from the tree. Did the creature have a den nearby? Maybe a burrow that it was hiding in until Lotor would give up and leave it be? Well, he wasn’t going to let this go. That creature was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

There was a cracking sound, and for a moment, Lotor feared that the old tree had picked this moment to fall over. It wouldn’t do to get himself killed at his sister’s wedding. He was too busy focusing on the gently swaying branches to notice the earth shifting beneath his feet. It was like the ground wanted to swallow him up, and he couldn’t even articulate a scream before he was falling into the darkness.

“Well, now look at what you’ve done. If you follow me down the rabbit hole, then there’s a 99.92715% chance that I’m going to be late!”

“I didn’t mean to! The… This ‘rabbit hole’ swallowed me up!” Lotor insisted. He had finally caught up to the creature, who didn’t seem at all concerned about this fall. They had been falling for so long, Lotor wasn’t sure how either of them could possibly survive the landing. He couldn’t even see the ground! How deep did this hole go? How – ?

He tried to ignore the sigh of relief from the creature when a book smacked Lotor square in the face. “Oh, good,” it chuckled. “If you get hit by a teapot next, that brings it down to –”

“Will you be quiet?” As soon as Lotor said it, his chin connected with a white object, and the sound of something breaking echoed around him. “Not a word,” he grumbled.

The creature just turned head over heels (over… heels?) and chattered about having something important to get to. Then, it…

It vanished.

No, not vanished. Lotor could see it scurrying across the floor.

The floor.

Oh no.

“Sorry for dying at your wedding, Allura. I hope you can forgive me,” Lotor muttered to himself as he braced for impact. An impact that would shatter his bones and leave him nothing but a mess for someone to clean up off the floor. An impact that…

It never came.

He opened one eye, then the other. Was he dead? He’d anticipated death being more painful.

Was the afterlife just… a room?

It was apparently a room with three different doors. One was downright miniscule, while the other two seemed more practical. He tried the first, but the doorknob wouldn’t even turn. The second would turn, but it was locked, with no keyhole to unlock it. And the tiny door… He would never fit through that!

Was the universe toying with him? Kept him alive after that fall just to leave him trapped in here.

Trapped. That creature had to be in here somewhere, right? Although… it was quite a lot smaller than Lotor was.

“Well, I might as well… try…” He crouched in front of the door. It looked like it belonged in one of Allura’s old dollhouses. He could barely fit his arm through it! He tested the tiny doorknob, finding it locked as well. “Not that it would help me much…” he muttered.

He turned around to survey his options and found something that hadn’t been there before. “I’ve gone mad,” he said to himself. A glass table had just… appeared! It wasn’t there a moment ago! “Who’s there!?” he demanded. Someone had to have put it there!

The room was otherwise empty. Just Lotor, the doors, the table, and a – no. No, he was staring right at that table! He would have seen someone put that bottle down!

“I’ve gone mad. I’ve gone completely and utterly, irreparably mad.” He picked up the small bottle. It was filled with a thick, green liquid that reminded him of a cough suppressant. He shuddered at the thought. He wasn’t anywhere near fool enough to drink some strange, mysteriously manifesting liquid that he just found at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

Still… there was no way out of here, and he would die without a way out. If this… substance was poisonous, at least it might be quicker than waiting here to starve…

And it did have a – no it didn’t! It hadn’t! It hadn’t had a label just a moment ago! And he’d been holding it! Where did this label come from? He wasn’t about to follow the directions on some label that couldn’t just be decent and be fixed on the bottle the whole time like a normal label!

No, he wasn’t going to. He put the bottle down and looked around the room. There were lamps on the walls that he hadn’t noticed before. The hole above him had – it was gone! Where was the rabbit hole? How was he supposed to get out of here? He couldn’t go through any of those doors, and he couldn’t climb back out. He really was trapped.

Or he was hallucinating his inner turmoil over feeling trapped at – no, now was not the time to analyze his own psychological state.

“Think, just… _think._ There’s a way out of here. There has to be, or whoever built it would be here too. Right?” There were several flaws in his logic, but he chose to ignore them. The only object in here that could possibly be of any help was that bottle.

“Well… to imminent death, I suppose,” he grumbled, uncorking the bottle.

It was bitter, but it was also barely a single sip, so he powered through it and immediately regretted it. The clatter as the bottle fell to the ground was like sledgehammers beating on his skull from the inside, and the room was spinning. _Way to poison yourself, Lotor. Wonderful job there._ He squeezed his eyes shut to keep from falling over as the room seemed to… get taller?

When he didn’t feel like he was about to pass out, he opened his eyes and nearly lost his balance anyway. The… the whole room had grown. Or he had shrunk. That second one sounded more plausible. Was it whatever was in that bottle? Was he actually hallucinating now? Whatever had been in that bottle…

But now he was small enough to pick the lock on that door and get out…

Except he didn’t have anything to pick the lock with.

“Well, this is just _great_.” He threw his head back and let out a sigh, and that’s when he caught a glimpse of… something gold and… _oh come on!_

There was a key sitting on top of the table, visible through the glass. Except it was way too big to fit the door, and Lotor was way too small to reach it now. Maybe he could just… break down the door…?

As soon as he turned around to act on _that_ idea, he ran smack into something… soft and… _sticky_ … A… giant cupcake? Well, given his current size, it was probably normally sized. It had a note like the bottle had. It wasn’t tall enough to get him up to the table to get the key, and after whatever that liquid had been, he wasn’t keen on trying anything else this freakish place gave him.

But if he shrunk some more…

He could try to get out through the tiny gap between the door and the ground. How would he get back to his usual size, though…?

He had nothing to lose.

The cupcake was sweet, almost too much so. A deep ache settled in his bones, and he felt strangely like a child going through a growth spurt again. It felt like something was pulling him in three different directions. Everything around him started to shrink, and he grabbed onto the table as soon as he could reach it again to steady himself. He took the key and put it in his pocket, not about to miss that again. But now he was too big for the door again!

The bottle was still empty – no it wasn’t. He’d just… It had just been empty, and then he’d blinked, and the green liquid had returned, as though he’d never drunk it at all! The bottle was still sealed and everything!

Well, only one way out.

“Aunt Dayak, what’s the matter?” Allura couldn’t help but notice her aunt’s frenzied behavior. The reception was lively enough, but…

“Do you know where your brother has gone?”

Allura couldn’t say she’d been paying much attention to Lotor. She’d only invited him because she’d been expected to. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for him. She did. She just… wasn’t too fond of his wild imagination. Everyone had expected him to grow out of it, but to this day he could be… prone to wild fantasies of magic worlds and strange creatures.

“I haven’t seen him recently,” she admitted.

“Oh, no matter. He’s probably around here somewhere. He probably just… went to escape the heat.” That was a reasonable enough explanation, and Allura was more than willing to accept it. Lotor would turn up. He always did.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, defs go check out the art that inspired this.
> 
> You can hit me up on tumblr at hashtag-anthems, or on twitter at hashtaganthems, if you want to. Otherwise, I should have another chapter ready once finals are out of the way. Hope you enjoyed!


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